Best known for his photorealistic drawings, Longo explores imagery within a complex social and cultural forces. Robert Longo was born in 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, and has had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to deeply influence his art. One of the quintessential artists of the 1980s, Longo is perhaps best known for the writhing, dancing figures in his iconic Men in the Cities series.

The American artist´s drawings are, perhaps, his most iconic. They are as much about the content they depict as they are about the artist´s intense devotion to the practice of drawing. His amazingly deep, anthracite charcoal drawings show emotional motives. Perhaps the best known photorealist series of Robert Longo´s is Men in the Cities, depicting contorted, life-size human figures in an urban setting. Robert Longo´s art focuses on his never-ending investigation of the themes of power and authority, which also permeate his series of blackened American flags (Black Flags, 1989–91), and oversized handguns (Bodyhammers, 1993–95). Longo´s series, Monsters, which depict massive breaking waves, and The Sickness of Reason, featuring atomic bomb blasts, followed in 2002 and 2004. It was during the 1980s that Robert Longo started to produce editions, mainly lithographs. He then gradually developed a high-end print technique, Pigment Print, which allows him to reproduce his drawings perfectly. Robert Longo´s prints capture the same level of detail and emotional impact of the original drawings.

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is known for large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that consider power, authority, and social unrest.

This image of an atomic blast belongs to Longo’s “The Sickness of Reason” body of work. It is based on an archival photograph of the first Chinese hydrogen bomb test performed June 17, 1967. The “The Sickness of Reason” series was inspired by an encounter with his children, in which they mistook an image of an atomic blast for a weather phenomenon.

Longo's elegant depiction of the looming mushroom cloud and the reality of what it signifies creates an elemental tension with this highly accomplished drawing. Hercules combines sublime beauty with raw and threatening physical power, creating a visual and narrative tension, which fluctuates between awe and fear.

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“ The roses and the bombs and the waves are things that exist at the moment of their being: [...]They are at the moment of their fulfillment. „

—Robert Longo